Awesome Open Source Company

This list is a collection of insights that can help building a Company around an Open Source project.

Contents

High-level open-source perspectives

• [Mike Volpi / Matt Turk] The Power of Open Source - The 3 waves of Open Source companies, what to look for in VCs

Retrospectives

• [Airbyte] What we learned from our Soft Launch - Their very first launch
• [Supabase] Should I open source my company - Pros and Cons from Supabase CEO
• [Dbt] - Series that reflects on the progress of dbt, from the ‘consulting/bootstrapped’ days to a fully fledge billion dollar company
  • One year in, we're still in business
  • Two years in, and it's just getting good
  • Three years in, and things are heating up
  • Four years in, from misfits to mainstream
• [Cal.com] Open-sourcing Business Applications - The oss journey of a business application, pretty different from the usual infrastructure / data product
• [Hugging Face] Hugging Face and the AI community - How they pivoted to a chatbot to the leading AI community
• [Plausible.io] How we bootstrapped our open source Google Analytics alternative to $500k ARR- The pros and cons of being bootstrapped and their marketing techniques

Business models

• [Wikipedia] Business models for open source softwares - Extensive lists of past and potential business models - Extensive lists of past and potential business models
• [Posthog] How we monetized our open source devtool- Laying out 4 of the main options: support, hosted vs self-hosted, open-core, donations ; and reflecting on Posthog’s journey
• [Andy Matuschak] - Meteor was a viable business, but not a viable venture-backed business - Why raising $53M led by a16z was not a good idea after all
• [dbt] Pricing Vision Fit - dbt CEO on how setting a low or high base price reveals your strategy
• [Lago] Open Source Alternatives do not win by default - OSS doesn't win by being cheaper

Company handbooks

• [Gitlab] Company handbook
• [Posthog] Company handbook
• [Airbyte] Company handbook
• [Strapi] Company handbook

Tools and databases

• [Posthog] Should open-source projects track you? - An ethical framework
• [COSS] $100M Revenue Commercial Open Source Index - A list of mature commercial OSS companies
• Star-History Plugin - See the star history of any Github repository

Logos and Mascots

• [Airbyte] How we chose our Logo and Mascot- Their internal iteration process
• [Posthog] How we chose our Mascot - The story behind the hedgehog